OPINION: Veganuary is upon us and as is now the tradition, farming organisations like the AHDB are rallying the troops to ‘fight back’. Their weapons: the environment and B12. Does that mean we should shift our focus back to ethics?

On Saturday, the Telegraph reported on the launch of a new counter-campaign to promote eating meat during Veganuary and what it calls “misinformation and false truths”. The Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board (AHDB) - a farmer-funded levy body - says it wants to “give farmers a voice” during the one month of the year when vegans have theirs as if animal agriculture doesn’t have enough already.

The AHDB’s ‘We Eat Balanced’ reeks of victim complex, portraying farmers yet again as the targets of cruel vegan lies. While they claim the campaign isn’t about competing with the vegan movement, they have unashamedly focused on the absence of B12 in plant-based diets and implied that meat and dairy products are essential for a balanced diet.

Last year, when the AHDB launched its first ‘We Eat Balanced’ television adverts, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received hundreds of complaints from the public and most major animal justice organisations in the UK. The ASA promptly investigated but ultimately dismissed the complaints, ruling that the AHDB had not unfairly implied that meat was essential and that the portrayal of how animals are reared in the UK wasn’t misleading.

While the ASA admitted that there was a questionable focus on B12 in some of the AHDB’s early social media graphics, with all the evidence sent to them about how animals are raised - including the countless investigations showing disgusting conditions and animals clearly suffering - it is hard to understand how they could let the AHDB get away with painting such a rosy, grass-fed picture of British farming. Yes, the UK’s beef herds are largely grass-fed, but what about everything that happens to dairy mothers for our milk, or to pigs for our bacon, or to chickens for our Sunday roasts.

Returning to this month’s debacle, the latest instalment of ‘We Eat Balanced’ will include adverts broadcast on Channel 4, ITV and Sky, plus on-demand streaming services. The British public will be shown “an inquisitive little girl”, Nancy, with her grandad, learning about red meat and dairy as, yes, natural sources of B12.

At first glance, it’s hard for vegans to get around the B12 issue. There is one plant-based source - duckweed, which is eaten widely in South East Asia - but in its fresh form, it is not readily available in Western supermarkets. We must therefore supplement, that’s unavoidable, but for every B12 deficient vegan there is an omnivore deficient in many other vitamins and minerals. Deficiencies are widespread among many different diets with the most common being iron, iodine, vitamin D, calcium and vitamin A. B12 isn’t just a vegan issue - more than 20 per cent of older adults are thought to be deficient in B12 due to decreasing ability to absorb with age, regardless of how much meat, fish, eggs and dairy they consume, meaning that supplementing is also required.

Vegans have many foods fortified with B12 to turn to, in addition to supplementing with oral sprays and tablets. And the funny thing is, omnivores eat Marmite and fortified foods without even realising it. There are breakfast cereals laced with iron and folic acid, Ribena with vitamin C, and even various brands of milk fortified with vitamin D… all aimed at omnivores. Fortification and supplementation is not a vegan curse, everyone does it, telling us that simply eating anything that breathes doesn’t automatically make us healthier. Any diet must be carefully considered and balanced, but one side of that scale doesn’t have to be weighed down with the lives of animals.

Says Professor Robert Pickard, quoted as an expert on the WeEatBalanced.com website: “Vitamin B12 deficiency can be avoided by including lean meat, fish, dairy, eggs and foods fortified with vitamin B12 as part of a balanced diet.” Even the AHDB’s own expert agrees that everyone should supplement with fortified foods that contain the synthesized form of B12. Somewhat hypocritical when a central aspect of the campaign is that animal products provide a natural source of B12. It should also be noted that the ‘natural’ forms of B12 - methylcobalamin (MeCbl), adenosylcobalamin (AdCbl), and hydroxycobalamin (OHCbl) - are commercially available as vegan-friendly supplements and are bioidentical to the forms of B12 found in animal products and human bodies.

The AHDB campaign’s director of marketing, Liam Byrne, said: “January is a key time of year for the campaign to run, as there is a greater emphasis on the 'reduce meat and dairy' message to consumers from brands, TV shows and the media in general.

“Through the campaign we are giving farmers a platform and a voice to present the facts about food and farming from the UK, and sharing across industry to make sure we are all using evidence-based information consistently.”

They do love to drop in ‘evidence-based’, the implication being that we make everything up. This is despite the wealth of scientific evidence and opinion, with the backing of the UN and many of the world’s foremost health and sustainability organisations, that we should be cutting back on animal products for our wellbeing and the environment. Still, the AHDB thinks the UK is a very special case indeed due to cows eating grass.

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Byrne added: “The We Eat Balanced campaign seeks to reconnect consumers with their food and demonstrates that if you’d like to make small positive changes for the better, then sourcing your meat and dairy from the UK will mean you’re buying a product with a lower carbon footprint, and produced to some of the highest production standards in the world.

“In addition, meat and dairy both contain vitamin B12, an essential nutrient not naturally present in foods of plant origin, so adding a little meat or dairy to your vegetables will boost the number of vitamins in your meal.”

Byrne’s words clearly set out their strategy for fighting back against Veganuary - B12 and the environment - and it’s not just them accusing vegans of eco-misinformation. A few days prior, the Telegraph also reported on comments from Lord Deben, chairman of the Climate Change Committee, about vegans “muddying” the debate about global warming to further an animal rights agenda.

Sounds like a bit of conspiracy theory, but with Animal Rebellion and sympathetic groups doing so well to raise the issue in the lead-up to, and during, COP26, and with their ties to animal liberation and direct action groups, there is some fire to the smoke. Animal Rebellion promotes a plant-based food system without animals, but as an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion. As such they have had to tread the line between environmentalism and animal rights, amplifying the overlap wherever present (and peacekeeping when environmentalists refuse to give up cheese). Fortunately, there has been a great deal more overlap that benefits both animal and environmental justice, although Lord Deben would rather imply that we vegans are solely doing it for the animals.

Worryingly, Lord Deben called for the UK to embrace a more mixed and regenerative approach to farming, using livestock grazing with crop rotation to address soil health. One of the looming threats to the vegan environmental movement in the near future is - in my opinion - holistic management. That is the erroneous belief that cows and other herbivores are essential for drawing down atmospheric carbon and improving soil quality through their excrement and other mechanical actions. As we know from the landmark Oxford University Grazed and Confused study, it’s all nonsense and they’re dreaming if they think holistically grazed farms can replace industrial farming, but it’s also a convenient way for non-vegans to justify some form of animal farming and for governments to keep farming lobbyists fairly happy while also throwing about environmental buzzwords. George Eustice, for example, UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, head of Defra and sixth-generation farmer, is one such proponent of regenerative agriculture using grazing animals and rotational crops and pastures, but even he admits that it will drive up the price of red meat and require a drastic change in farming.

Whether regenerative grazing or whatever you want to call it works or not, both Lord Deben, the AHDB and other supporting bodies like the National Farmers Union (NFU) all adopt a very insular, UK-only perspective. Practically, this makes sense for them, they’re only concerned with protecting UK interests and a government can only enforce changes locally. But climate change isn’t only a UK problem. Grass-fed cows might have a lower environmental impact than cattle fed on soy from deforested Amazon plantations, but as we saw from the disappointment that was COP26, governments acting in their own interests and only seeing the problem from a national perspective won’t amount to the change we so desperately need.

The AHDB’s nutrition argument is fairly easy to refute, whereas the environmental discussion does get a bit confusing - vegan advocates must have a grasp of political issues and familiarity with various studies and environmental principles to deal with it effectively. For example, if one meets a cattle farmer and says how eating soy-feed beef is bad for the Amazon, they just tell you to buy local grass-fed British and carry on as always. Unless you know the studies and statistics that tell us that grass-fed, locally produced meat isn’t actually as great as they say, it’s difficult to walk away from that interaction with a positive feeling (although you could ask if they eat vegan while on holiday or always ask where their restaurant steak was sourced).

Add to this another point made by Lord Deben, that “extreme” arguments from vegans and green activists risk turning people away from the fight against climate change. With reluctance, he has a point, but this is where we reach a moment in each of our minds when we have to remind ourselves of our true intent and focus. We are fighting for the rights and freedom of animals and while that is extreme to many, we - for the most part, but not always - have the key issues of our times on our side: public health, the prevention of zoonotic pandemics, and of course climate change. None of these big issues taken in isolation present black-and-white cases for veganism, but rather it’s the combined ‘pros’ that provide the win. Plant-based isn’t the perfect panacea to the world’s woes, but overall it provides too many benefits that otherwise would have to be achieved through complex technologies and ungainly quick fixes like teaching cows to use toilets or feeding them seaweed to stop them farting. Seriously.

As advocates, we must know how to utilise each argument depending on the conversation. For this month, while the AHDB seeks to counter Veganuary by confusing the public over the issues of the environment and B12, we can in turn ask why they refuse to tell the truth about the emergence of zoonotic diseases and antibiotic-resistant bacteria from intensive farming, or misrepresent the way enormous numbers of animals are treated. Veganuary will see another successive year of growth, but we shouldn’t be complacent. We must be ready to ask the difficult questions and remind people that there are many other facets to the discussion about eating animals than soil health and supplementing B12, as the AHDB would have us believe. And unless you declare yourself to be an emotionless psychopath with no regard for life, and provided you have access to plant-based options and information, the ethics of veganism are undeniable.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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